Automattic has invested $30 million in Titan, a professional email suite aimed at businesses and companies offering white-labeled email solutions for customers. At WordCamp India 2021, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said that the company had just made “a pretty large investment” in the India-based startup and stated that it “will be a big part of…
A few weeks ago, Automattic released Quadrat on the WordPress.org theme directory. It is now the company’s fourth block theme. Like its predecessors, it is a child of Blockbase, a project that serves as a foundation for the work of Automattic’s Theme Team. After spending a couple of months diving deep into the world of…
Gutenberg 11.2.0 was released today with expanded color support for the Search and Pullquote blocks. Historically, customizing these elements has been out of reach for most users if their themes didn’t include them as options. This release introduces color support and border color support for the search button. Pullquotes are getting a similar treatment with…
Marketing consultant Bridget Willard announced the first commercial content pack for her Launch With Words project. Last week, she released a set of 12 blog posts for roofing contractors, but there are more on the way for industry-specific content. In January, alongside Ronald Huereca of MediaRon, Willard launched the Launch With Words plugin. The initial…
It has been several months since I last dived into Nick Diego’s Block Visibility plugin, and it is now one year since the initial release. Recently moved on from his past job into the WordPress product space, he has been building one of the best context-based plugins for showing or hiding content. In January, Diego…
Company A sells its plugin. Company B picks it up and moves forward with an overhauled version that looks and feels much different than the original. Users are outraged by the changes. It seems to be a repeating theme in 2021, almost as a rule rather than an exception. Last month, Termly announced its acquisition…
WordPress 5.8 introduced an opt-in system for themes to configure block settings, styles, templates, and more. It is done through a new theme.json file that authors can put at the root of their theme folders. Anne McCarthy, the lead of the FSE Outreach Program, announced a survey earlier today to get feedback from developers on…
PublishPress, makers of the PublishPress and PublishPress Blocks plugins, have adopted the Organize Series plugin from Darren Ethier. Organize Series is a 15-year-old plugin for organizing and displaying posts in a series, useful for novel writers, educators, magazine sites, and anyone breaking their longer content up into a series. PublishPress is also adopting seven extensions…
In one of the most apropos uses of a .blog domain, Refined.blog is a new website that promotes personal blogging with a curated list of software engineering blogs. It’s a simple site with an index of blogs, their Hacker News scores, tags, and a link to each blog’s RSS feed. The search function is very…
Earlier this month, TeslaThemes announced that it was rebranding to WPRealEstate. The company wanted to focus its efforts on a single niche in the theming market and cut back on the library of projects it was maintaining. In 2017, Imagely acquired TeslaThemes. The shop was created in 2013 and had grown its library to 68…
WordCamp US will be held online this year on October 1, 2021. Organizers are planning a free, one-day event that will feature networking opportunities, speaker sessions, and workshops. Michelle Frechette, one of the organizers, said the team is planning on hosting a contributor day and will add more information to the event’s website over the…
Rich Tabor, the Senior Product Manager of WordPress Experience at GoDaddy, has been on a bit of a publishing productivity and workflow kick as of late. The co-creator of the Iceberg Editor plugin released a Markdown Comments block last month, allowing users to write editor-only notes. Last week, he launched the Todo List Block plugin.…
Today marks the 31st anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a civil rights law passed in 1990 that prohibits discrimination against people with physical or mental impairments that substantially limit a major life activity. The legislation continues to help disabled people gain equal access to employment, schools, transportation, government services, and public accommodations.…
The WordPress.org Themes Team announced an open discussion and date for a Zoom meeting with theme authors. The team is proposing a new set of guidelines that reduces and simplifies what is currently in place. Comments on the proposal are open through July 26, and the meeting is set for July 28, 2 pm CET.…
WooCommerce has shipped version 5.5.2 as a follow-up to the forced security update that patched a SQL Injection vulnerability last week. The vulnerability impacted versions 3.3 to 5.5 of the WooCommerce plugin, as well as versions 2.5 to 5.5 of the WooCommerce Blocks feature plugin. The team created a patch for more than 90 releases, which was sent as…